I read with great interest, Brother Guy Consolmagno's Night Life article in the September issue. I can attest to the great astronomical work that is done by the Vatican astronomers. My company recently published one of our new [url=http://www.apogeespacebooks.com/Books/Pockets/Mars.html]Pocket Space Guides entitled Mars[/url]. Whilst researching the book we had heard about the Vatican's astronomy department and we emailed them to ask about their original 19th century observations of Mars. Within 4 hours they had emailed to us all of Father Pietro Angelo Secchi's drawings and diagrams of the planet that he had created in 1858. When I asked Bob Zubrin who had first coined the term "Canali" when observing Mars, he immediately replied Schiaparelli, which is the conventional wisdom. Imagine how surprised he was when I informed him that Secchi had used the phrase years before Schiaparelli.